Entries in investment
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The Investfographic from EquipRent.com is the infographic they designed in-house to share with potential investors. Visual aids and infographics are becoming a valuable tool for companies to communicate with potential investors and shareholders. Consider this to be a visual elevator pitch.

Using an “InvestFoGraphic” to raise capital

As a serial entrepreneur, I am always looking for an edge that makes a company standout and be noticed during capital raising times.

With the advent of new software tools like Prezi to boost your presentations, we decided to creatively put together a colorful investment infographic handout that completely complied with our goal of keeping our story concise, relevant, and exciting. The typical handout (1-page executive summary) that we had previously given VCs was heavy on words explaining in great detail what our company did and how successful we had been. This new graphic handout was riddled with bold and exciting claims about our company and our industry. The underlying theory behind using the infographic was to hook them first, grab their attention and then be ready to talk business.

The exciting news is that we are now in final discussions with several investor groups to close our funding. We know the infographic wasn’t the main reason for getting to this final phase, but we do know that differentiating yourself makes you more memorable and shows investors you and your company plan on being different than the massess.

Remember the advice that the great Rod Stewart gave years ago: Every picture tells a story, don’t it!

The team at EquipRent uses the design as a talking point at investor events. They found it much easier to point out the visuals and discuss each point with their investors. They shared with Cool Infographics, a few of the comments made by investors after seeing the design:

“I can quickly see what is different about this company than reading a typical one-page executive summary.”

“I have never seen anyone use an infographic for investor purposes, other than to distinguish market trends.”

A hypothetical startup will get about $15,000 from family and friends, about $200,000 from an angel investor three months later, and about $2 Million from a VC another six months later. If all goes well. See how funding works in this infographic:

Is dilution bad? No, because your pie is getting bigger with each investment. But, yes, dilution is bad, because you are losing control of your company. So what should you do? Take investment only when it is necessary. Only take money from people you respect. (There are other ways, like buying shares back from employees or the public, but that is further down the road.)

This is a great design that uses pie charts correctly and effectively! This is in contrast to the many designs that use pie charts inappropriately. This is a great example of a visual explanation that uses a combination of data visualization, illustration and text to tell a clear story.

The color coding is also effective, but for some reason they didn’t color the co-founder icon character green to match his portion of the pies. The URL link to the original infographic landing page is also missing in the footer, so it makes it hard for readers to find the full-size original version when they see it posted on other sites. People aren’t always good about creating links back to the original, so the URL should be included in the infographic image file itself.

Designed by InfoNewt (my company), this design follows the strategy of telling one story really well. There are hundreds of charts online showing the power of compound interest and why people should invest early for retirement. We took a different approach to put the power of those savings into terms that young adults are more likely to relate to…BEER!